Hypertension is the fourth killer of Ghanaians – GHS

Dr Yao Yeboah, Chairman of the Governing Council, Ghana Health Service (GHS) on Tuesday said hypertension is the fourth killer of Ghanaians across the country and the first killer of patients that attended the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital.

He said the health sector concentrates higher percentage of its national budget to address diabetes and hypertension.

He said the disorders were caused by preventable individual lifestyles like excessive drinking of alcohol, lack of exercises, and eating non-healthy diets.

Dr Yeboah said this during a presentation of the GHS’s “Health Promotion (HP) Strategic Plan,” at a media engagement workshop in Accra.

He said a lot of the country’s resources were used in taking care of people who were sick, a step he said should be discouraged, citing a result of a research conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) that indicated that 75 per cent of all illnesses recorded across the globe, could be prevented.

Dr Yeboah said: “We cannot totally blame the government for not committing enough resources for health promotion, perhaps part of the blame comes from those in the health sector who do not advocate adequately to the government and the public for them to appreciate the importance of health promotion”.

He noted that the GHS was committed to ensuring that enough work was done to retrain staff of the service to make them more focused and effective, and also ensure that budgets are rather spent on health issues that are non-preventable than on preventable ones.

“As a state, we should collaborate in the years ahead to ensure that unnecessary budgets are not spent to take care of people who are sick at the expense of other areas of the economy that we need funding for,” he said.